Uneasy Possessions: The Mother-Daughter Dilemma in French Women's Writing, 1671-1928 (review)

The story of mother-daughter relations is central to any postmodern understanding of both the history of being female and the current socio-psychic situation of women, either as daughters of mothers or as mothers of daughters. Following in the tradition of feminist literary critics such as Marianne Hirsch and E. Ann Kaplan, Katherine Ann Jensen offers readers an intriguing analysis of mother-daughter relations in both French literature and history that spans four centuries. While earlier studies of the mother-daughter relationship in literature have relied most often on psychoanalytic theories of mother-child differentiation following the preoedipal stage as described by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, Jensen bases her analysis on Jessica Benjamin's theory of intersubjectivity, allowing for a more nuanced view of the maternal figure than that supported by the post-Freudian scenario of the blissful mother-child dyad separated by the phallic presence of the Father. By applying Benjamin's ideas to the works of five female French writers (Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Sévigné, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, George Sand and Colette), Jensen makes a compelling case for the centrality of maternal narcissism over four centuries and the elements of Hegelian domination and submission in the model of mother-daughter reflectivity.

In her thorough and extensive introduction, Jensen elucidates Benjamin's psychoanalytic theory of intersubjective relations and illustrates how this theory can be useful in understanding mother-daughter dynamics in particular. She then presents a detailed examination of three French treatises on girls' education from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with commentary on the historical and social context of each work and suggestions as to how the evolution of maternal authority as reflected in these works supports her own arguments on the authors in her study. Next comes a historical analysis of the individualism that was both a product of and an intrinsic cause of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, supported by the works of social historian Gabrielle Houbre and author Paule Constant. Finally, Jensen returns to Benjamin's theories and their value in illuminating the deep-rooted causes of socio-political evolution in modern France. Interspersed among these various components of the introduction are references to, and occasionally detailed accounts of, the maternal figures represented in the works of the five authors Jensen has chosen for her study, thereby giving readers a taste of the in-depth literary analysis still to come.

Jensen then dedicates a chapter to each of the five writers mentioned above. These chapters consist of a thorough and cogent analysis of the mother-daughter couple in each author's work, informed by previous scholarship as well as by the socio-historical context. Taken separately, each chapter provides a convincing and authoritative reading of the works under consideration, both in terms of their portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship and in terms of the broader import of the texts and the author. Using the lens of intersubjective theory, Jensen expands on previous feminist interpretations of each author in turn, transforming mother-daughter conflict from a necessary Oedipal drama of separation into an intersubjective dilemma of a narcissistic mother vying for control of her daughter-other in order to defend her conception of herself. As the cultural value of individualism increases from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, Jensen contends, this individualism becomes more problematic for both mothers and daughters caught in a culturally condoned cycle of mother-daughter reflectivity.

While each chapter forms a persuasive argument for the importance of intersubjectivity in understanding mother-daughter relations, the comparison among the five authors remains somewhat problematic. Although the use of intersubjective theory as the overarching theme to tie the five authors together works quite well up to a certain point, even across four centuries of great political and social upheaval, it is difficult to account for differences in fictional versus autobiographical works (memoirs and correspondence) without relying on...